This week's writing group brought me to a point of rage last night. A veritable storm of frustration in which I thundered in the living room while reading my comments. I shared with my wife last night.
Now I share it with you.
Last night I arrived with fresh work, the new project I'm working. Book 3.0. Since it was chapter 1, I'll denote this as 3.0.1. Noting it like this reminds me that I have worked around computers for far too long...
With 2.0 I stretched my character introductions out several chapters. Sewing their flaws, traits, and personality over several hundred pages. So when I started thinking on 3.0, one of the first things I wanted to do was splatter the character out in an array of imagery in their introductory chapters so that I could spend the rest of the book on to the story. It's an experiment, one which I think has worked well for 3.0.1 but less so for 3.0.2 and I'm still in the process of working the kinks out.
But that's why I'm doing it. To experiment and find out what works and what doesn't. Okay. All of this is prologue to my storming rage of why I had an issue with a certain couple of people in my writing group last night.
I start the first chapter off--Actually, let me just show you the text and the response... This is part of the chapter I wrote.
A familiar fragrance perked his attention. He spun around in his chair for his favorite moment of the day, facing the entrance of his cubicle like a hungry dog waiting on his dinner. He could see pink tufts over his cube wall. Dancing on his nose, the forbidden bubblegum scent of Mailroom Jenny gave him warmth in his cold life.
She walked into his cubicle, blond hair, drawn into two tiny pigtails sticking up, dyed pink. A tight, brown shirt covered her, so tight against her skin Bill could see bra-lines. Her blue jeans were low cut, leaving just a hint of flesh between the shirt and pants. Pink glossy lipstick decorated her full lips. Her skin was porcelain white, and her cheeks were blushed with pink.
She was walking pornography in the workplace. In the old days, before this was a call center, the old crones that worked here would never allow such a flagrantly seductive vision to roam the floors of the office. But now that Bill worked in the middle of a call center, the dress code had...relaxed.
“Mailroom Jenny,” Bill said in his best imitation of a suave, flirty voice. He overheard one of the guys say she was only nineteen. Shit, she wasn’t even born in the 80s. She probably didn’t even know what Ghostbusters was. And he was hitting on her. The shameful cast of his eyes washed against the well-defined curves of her young body.
She made an O out of her mouth and blew a bubble of her gum. She handed him his mail after the bubble popped. Then she winked and turned, strutting out of his cube. As she left, Bill watched her ass shake and sighed.
And now a couple of responses written in the sides of my copy I handed them...
Is he talking to her? If so, I don't like him calling her "Mailroom Jenny." - just Jenny.
Actually she WAS born in the 80s.
The details of Jenny are creatively described, but overall, her dress & behavior is a little cliché.
And now my response...
It's a throw away bit part! A girl walks into a scene for four paragraphs and is never seen again in the story. I don't care how cliché or unique a walk in bit is for someone who's around 286 words and never seen again. I want a quick snapshot of her, no more. I want the reader to "get" what kind of person this is in the least amount of words possible, because it's not her that's important, it's Bill's reaction to her.
And perhaps, just PERHAPS I did the math before I wrote a line like "Shit she wasn't even born in the 80s." This year is the year 2009. If you subtract 19 from 2009 you get...wait for it...1990.
And lastly. I like that Bill calls her Mailroom Jenny. He's a male, gawking at a woman half his age, and poorly flirting with her. Of course, if I had him say, "Hey, Jenny" and wink like Rico Suave, that would have been cliché. But if I do something original and awkward, well that's wrong too.
And thus we come to the title of my post. Look, I go to this group for critique. I take a few on the chin in order to better my work. Some of the folks there have very informative, intelligent, and helpful things to say. But these sorts of comments are just... well they're fucking nitpicks.
While sitting in my cube, chatting, I uttered a non sequitur. After a few seconds of silence, my cube mate finally says, "Was that a Thundercat's reference?"
Eventually, I said, "Screw its sell-ability!" I just started because it was fun and I needed the practice.
This past weekend, my son had some questions about his algebra homework assignment. Essentially, he was wanting to know what b was in the equation y=mx+b and I spouted off without even thinking, "B is the point where your mx line intersects the Y-axis."
It's been over seven weeks now since I wrote on my book, I'm going to call it book 2.0 from here on out. I guess I could call it by it's title but really, why bother. Anyway, I abandoned 2.0 seven weeks ago in favor of doing...anything but revision.
